IIM Ahmedabad has teamed up with Random House to publish a series of management and business books, under the ‘IIM Ahmedabad Business Books Series’, to bring their teachings to a wider audience.

IIM Ahmedabad has teamed up with Random House to publish a series of management and business books, under the ‘IIM Ahmedabad Business Books Series’, to bring their teachings to a wider audience. One such book is Satish Y Deodhar’s Why I am Paying More (Random House; Rs299; 277 pages). This is his second book as part of the series. Interestingly, Satish Deodhar was the first convenor of the computerised common admission test (CAT) administered in 2009, an experiment that was plagued by leaks and viruses.

One glance at the book’s cover and you would expect it to be about pricing; since that is what the title says. But the book is really about Economics 101, with concepts like demand, supply, monopoly, price ceiling, price floor, oligopoly, etc, explained in detail. After all, it goes without saying that pricing is central to the field of economics. The title seems to have been rephrased from Economics 101 to Why I am Paying More. It feels a lot like a textbook, with simpler words, less jargon and a lot more real-world examples. A crossword at the end of the book is a neat idea to test readers’ proficiency after the book has been read. However, readers will certainly get an impression that this is the same generic stuff that is available in most textbooks and not an exclusive from IIM Ahmedabad. Deodhar’s writing is a bit prosaic; more humour would have helped.

Thanks to the Internet, readers today have a wealth of information sources, at the click of a button, from the finest global universities, including easier-to-follow videos. They could try their hand at learning from websites like MIT’s Open Courseware. Also, a better way to learn economics is to read books that are offbeat and fun and keep readers engaged, like Stephen Levitt’s Freakonomics or Tim Harford’s Undercover Economics.